03/18/2014

It's always political when you e sit down and eat because the fact that they're not eating much beyond rice and beans, that's already a political statement... That says more about a culture than they may want you to see. But there it is.

-Anthony Bourdain, "The Joe Rogan Experience" 1:57:10

Despite the importance of ideas to a well functioning political process, politics is fundamentally about the mundane. It is about whether there is bread on the table, whether there is the provision of basic publics goods like roads and sanitation, and whether people generally have the freedom to do what they want. In the Western world, it is easy to forget that, and to think that politics is about the relatively abstract battles (and inconsequential) about the justice of foreign wars, or whether there shall be a marginal increase in spending for a certain welfare program.

However, that is largely a product of living in a country whose politics are the best in the world. For much of the world, politics can be summed up by what’s not on the dinner table and, as Bourdain noted, such mundane experiences can be seditious political statements.

The episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience” Boudain was a guest in, which is definitely worth listening to in full, is attached below: